Welcome to the Hog Blog, a blog chronicling minor-league baseball in the Lehigh Valley. Tom Housenick, The Morning Call's IronPigs beat writer, has been at The Morning Call since 2008. In a previous lifetime, he was at Lackawanna County Stadium in Moosic talking with future Phillies Jimmy Rollins, Pat Burrell, Shane Victorino and Ryan Howard, among many others.
He’ll now be spending his summers in search of who the Phillies are hoping to be the next Chase Utley and Cole Hamels plus any outfielder who catch and hit. What he really hopes to find are the next Mariano Rivera, Todd Helton and Jim Thome --- great human beings who happened to be great at this sport.
He spent the last five years covering Colonial League football, college basketball and high school track & field.

Scott Mathieson's name rarely comes up in discussions of Phillies pitching prospects, primarily because the 25-year-old Canadian has undergone two Tommy John surgeries and an ulner nerve transposlition Sept. 29, 2006.

But the hard-throwing right hander hopes to give the Phillies, for whom he made nine starts in 2006, something to think about later this summer.

Mathieson was operating the radar gun at the IronPigs game Monday and said the plan is for him to start throwing bullpen sessions and batting practice during extended spring training early next month. If all goes well he'll start throwing in game situations in May, a year after his second Tommy John surgery, and the Phillies hope he'll be "out of Florida" by June.

Asked what he thought that meant, Mathieson smiled and said, "Double-A, Triple-A ... after the last two years I'd be happy to wind up in Lakewood."

As a 22-year-old in 2006 Mathieson was a combined 10-3 with a 3.40 ERA at Reading and Scranton, with 135 strikeouts in 127 innings.